This is a follow-up to A Take of Three Blurs, which I wrote in 2006 as a guide to the blur effects in Adobe After Effects.
Twelve years later, there are some new blurs in After Effects, some new best practices, and new potential for confusion.

TLDR

Use Fast Box Blur now, for everything.
But c’mon, there’s so much more to know about After Effects blurs!

The Three Oldies

This was the breakdown in 2006:
Fast Blur was a good, general-purpose blur. It was “fast” because it was just a three-iteration box blur, and box blurs can be

Adobe Premiere Pro has been aggressively pursuing the creative editorial market at all levels, from feature films to YouTube. It’s now where I do all my cutting, and even finishing. Yes, that’s right, my age-old advice to finish in After Effects instead of an NLE is well and truly obsolete. Premiere renders with great quality, and any tools I felt were missing from the pipeline I’ve created myself.
Part of Premiere’s ascendancy has included folding in the color features of SpeedGrade, exactly as I advised back in 2011. The result, the Lumetri color panel,

On Tuesday, December 5th, everything at Red Giant will be 40% off!
But that is literally not all. Between now and then, you can enter for a chance to win everything Red Giant makes, for free! Here's how.

<img class="thumb-image" alt="Stu and Ben in April, 2002. I took a picture of us with my Nikon Coolpix 995 as he took one with his Yashica T4. He wins for coolest camera. I win for being able to find the photo 15 years later." data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/5a04e81753450aa7b95d8ba9/1510271000760/020406-DSCN4877-.jpg" data-image-dimensions="2048x1536" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-load="false" data-image-id="5a04e81753450aa7b95d8ba9" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/5a04e81753450aa7b95d8ba9/1510271000760/020406-DSCN4877-.jpg?format=1000w" />
Stu and Ben in April, 2002. I took a picture of us with my Nikon Coolpix 995 as he took one with his Yashica T4. He wins for coolest camera. I win for being able to find the photo 15 years later.

Or, More Accurately, a Transcription of a Therapy Session for Someone Who Wants the New Thing, but Really Would Be Better Off With the Old Thing

In my last Lightroom post, I mentioned that my friend Benjamin Warde is a product manager on the Lightroom team. I’ve known Ben since we were kids, and we’ve long had

Red Giant has released Universe 2.2. Universe is our ever-growing collection of editorial effects and transitions, where you’ll find such favorites as VHS and Retrograde.
As is often the case, there’s a Red Giant film to go along with this release, and this time it marks the directorial debut of our own Aharon Rabinowitz. He made a film that is so uniquely him that, well, you should just watch it:
And the making of, where I get a little shout-out for helping figure out hoe to recreate the retro optical-printer VFX:
And now, feel free to learn more about Continue reading "Universe 2.2 and a New Red Giant Film"

Today is a big day.
Ever since we released Slugline, the most frequent request we’ve had was to get Slugline on iOS.
It took a long time, because we wanted to do it right. We realized that we needed to re-write scrolling, so it would be fast and smooth. We knew we had to speed up pagination. We wanted to support fancy new iOS 11 things like split-screen and drag-and-drop.
We did all those things. And now Slugline for iOS is available in the App Store for $19.99.

Today, Samsung and Amazon announced yet another HDR standard for televisions. In case you're not familiar with the idea of a High Dynamic Range display, it's—get this—brighter than a normal display. That's it. This groundbreaking idea apparently needed about four competing standards, one from Dolby, the sound company. Now there's a fifth.
I coudn't resist chiming in on Twitter.

More ways for your TV to show everything incorrectly and suck. HDR is the end of any prayer that consumers will see our work as we intend. https://t.co/IPAVKkWOJs

<img class="thumb-image" alt="This is a photograph made with a telephone." data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/58bdac74bebafb465e9f7458/1488825653872/This+is+a+photograph+made+with+a+telephone." data-image-dimensions="1500x1038" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-load="false" data-image-id="58bdac74bebafb465e9f7458" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/58bdac74bebafb465e9f7458/1488825653872/This+is+a+photograph+made+with+a+telephone.?format=1000w" />
This is a photograph made with a telephone.

If you look back through my recent Instagram posts, you may notice something unusual (for me): the majority of photos I’ve posted lately are not from my big, full-frame cameras (currently: 5D Mark III, Sony a7S II, and Sony RX1R II), but rather from my iPhone 7 Plus.
Posting iPhone photos to Instagram is hardly unusual, but what’s new is that I’m once again inspired by the creative possibilities of my little telephone camera. Part of this inspiration comes from the ability to shoot raw with Lightroom Mobile.

My new set of seasonal presets are out, and these ones are all about black and white. If you've been following me on Instagram, you've probably noticed my preoccupation with monochrome. The first photos I ever shot and processed myself were black and white (film, of course), and in many ways I find it to be the purest form of photography. There's only one problem:

This is something different than my usual tutorials. Instead of demonstrating the features of the new Magic Bullet Suite 13, I simply sat down and graded a short sequence of shots. The result is a fast-moving unrehearsed color session in which you see me explore and experiment, using the new Colorista IV panel in Adobe Premiere Pro.
For more Magic Bullet Suite tutorials, check out my announcement post and a whole post just about tutorials.
And if you're inspired to buy Magic Bullet or anything else from Red Giant (like Trapcode or PluralEyes), there's no better day than tomorrow. For one day only, everything at Red Giant will be 40% off in our Year End Sale. But don't take my word for it, check out this awesome video:

Guided Color Correction in Magic Bullet Colorista IV

There's no better example of Red Giant's commitment to make great color accessible to all video editors than the new Guided Color Correction feature in Colorista IV. The tool walks you through a step-by-step process of balancing out a shot. You get great results easily, and you stay in control the whole time.

Red Giant has just releasedMagic Bullet Suite 13, a massive update to our color correction and look creation tools.
This is such an epic update that I barely know where to start.

Colorista IV

Colorista IV is my new favorite creative tool. It now runs as a panel inside Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, which means that you can use it as your go-to color tool without ever having to manually apply it to your clips. Just start working with the panel and Colorista is there.

Colorista IV features new Temperature and Tint controls, as well as LUT support, log processing, an updated keyer, and a new Point Curve that works seamlessly with the familiar Colorista parameterized curve.
There’s also Guided Color Correction, a Continue reading "Magic Bullet Suite 13"

<img class="thumb-image" alt="Three cameras that can make photos with blurry backgrounds." data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/57ec5b2146c3c4bb29648c81/1475107625420/" data-image-dimensions="1500x1123" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-load="false" data-image-id="57ec5b2146c3c4bb29648c81" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/57ec5b2146c3c4bb29648c81/1475107625420/?format=1000w" />
Three cameras that can make photos with blurry backgrounds.

The star feature of the iPhone 7 Plus is its dual-camera system. The typical 28mm-equivalent iPhone camera is joined by a 56mm-equivalent. This allows for a 2x optical zoom at the touch of a virtual button, but, more interestingly, it also opens the door to some interesting computational photography.

Two cameras don't really make for a light field camera, where a computer model is built of the captured light rays, allowing them to be projected onto a virtual image capture plane, through a synthetic aperture.

<img class="thumb-image" alt="Three cameras that can make photos with blurry backgrounds." data-image="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/57ec5b2146c3c4bb29648c81/1475107625420/" data-image-dimensions="1500x1123" data-image-focal-point="0.5,0.5" data-load="false" data-image-id="57ec5b2146c3c4bb29648c81" data-type="image" src="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f4e093e4b085e4457080e1/t/57ec5b2146c3c4bb29648c81/1475107625420/?format=1000w" />
Three cameras that can make photos with blurry backgrounds.

The star feature of the iPhone 7 Plus is its dual-camera system. The typical 28mm-equivalent iPhone camera is joined by a 56m-equivalent. This allows for a 2x optical zoom at the touch of a virtual button, but, more interestingly, it also opens the door to some interesting computational photography.

Two cameras don't really make for a light field camera, where a computer model is built of the captured light rays, allowing them to be projected onto a virtual image capture plane, through a synthetic aperture. That's what Lytro is doing with their plenoptic Cinema Camera (see previous post), and more analogously, what Light is promising with the 16-lensed L16 camera (two posts on that one so far).

Computational Photography is Here (and Has Been for a While actually)

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SeriouslyPhotography is curated by Keith Teare. The top Photography and Videography blogs are monitored. It is intended as a convenience for those who want to monitor the ever-changing ecosystem - both in terms of the equipment, software, people and the ideas underlying their activities.
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